From Antibiotics To Food Safety: Sample6 Finds A Niche, And $12.7M, After A Sharp Turn

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FORBES, August 22, 2016:

Say the words “synthetic biology,” and venture capitalists think instantly about money in pharmaceuticals. Synlogic, an MIT spinout working to program microbes into drugs that I’ve covered here, is one example.

Most VCs don’t think about food, unless they’re eating it. But the scientific entrepreneurs that cooked up Synlogic, James Collins and Tim Lu, have other ideas with potential applications. One of them, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup called Sample6, scoped out antibiotic discovery, found it couldn’t raise money during the grim market of 2009, and hopscotched into food safety.